Ross Deane · CV

Hands-on engineering leader

About me

I am a pragmatic, hands-on engineering leader with 18+ years of experience building and scaling software platforms across startups and scaleups.

My work spans distributed systems design, engineering leadership, and delivering products from early architecture through to production scale.

I started as the third employee at DueDil as it grew to 150+ people, later scaled the engineering organisation at Vorboss from 3 to around 35 engineers, and now work with Artlogic to modernise and evolve the software platform used across the art world.

I enjoy roles that combine deep technical execution with product thinking, stakeholder collaboration, and team leadership.

Impact highlights

Working with Artlogic product teams and customers to modernise a core art-market platform
Scaled engineering organisation at Vorboss from 3 to around 35 engineers
Built internal and partner-facing platforms used daily by 100+ operational users
Early engineer at DueDil, helping scale platform to around 1M MAU and 40M+ companies indexed

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Work experience

Principal Engineer

Artlogic, London

Jul 2026 - present

Working with product teams and customers to modernise Artlogic's platform and deliver new features for galleries, artists, collectors, and the wider art market. Focused on building the operating system of the art world: pragmatic, reliable software for collections, relationships, workflows, and digital experiences.

Collaborating with product teams and customers to shape valuable features
Modernising product and engineering foundations while continuing to ship
Applying hands-on leadership across architecture, implementation, and delivery
Using agentic development to improve engineering flow across the SDLC
Turning art-world domain knowledge into practical software capabilities
Balancing customer outcomes, product quality, and technical sustainability

Head of Engineering

Vorboss, London

Apr 2021 - Jun 2026

Joined as the first senior engineer and quickly became Head of Engineering, scaling the team to around 35 engineers with approximately five team leads reporting directly. Responsible for architecture and delivery of internal platforms supporting rollout and operation of a large-scale fibre network.

Architected and led Compass, a graph-based network intelligence platform built on Neo4j
Built Volcano, an internal CRM and order generation platform
Designed and delivered an External Channel API for partner availability search and ordering
Introduced event-driven architecture with Kafka and a GraphQL service layer
Hired and mentored engineers and team leads across multiple teams
Continued to work around 90% hands-on across architecture, implementation, and technical delivery

Senior Software Engineer

Awin Ltd, London

Feb 2020 - May 2021

Awin is a global affiliate marketing network. I was part of the Sabre team, responsible for recording and processing post-ad-click transactions at scale. Much of my work focused on modernising the legacy PHP4-based tracking system.

Developed backend services in Java using Spring
Maintained legacy PHP systems while contributing to platform modernisation
Worked across distributed architecture handling high-volume transactional data
Mentored junior engineers and collaborated closely with product teams

Full Stack Developer → Team Lead

DueDil (now FullCircl), London

Oct 2010 - Feb 2020

DueDil was a high-growth startup offering business intelligence through a searchable data platform. I joined as the third employee and helped grow the engineering team and technical foundation as the company scaled beyond 100 people.

Built the major search platform using React and Elasticsearch
Developed Python data ingestion microservices and core platform services
Designed and implemented the core DueDil API
Migrated legacy Drupal systems to Symfony services
Led a team of around 10 engineers on the core company intelligence platform and API
Scaled the API platform covering intelligence on 40M+ European companies
Supported a platform serving around 1M monthly active users
Introduced CI pipelines, automated testing, and stronger operational monitoring